While women were busy burning their bras in the late 1960s, Goldie Hawn was slipping into a bikini and body paint to play a bombshell ditz with a high pitched giggle on the sketch comedy show Laugh-In. But in the process of charming the hell out of America and catapulting herself to It-girl status, the 22-year-old Hawn also managed to raise some feminist eyebrows. “An editor from a women’s magazine came up to me and said, ‘Don’t you feel terrible that you’re playing a dumb blonde?’” recalls the star, who was stunned by the query. “I said, ‘I don’t understand that question because I’m already liberated. Liberation comes from the inside.’”

It’s clear that Hawn’s commitment to being her own woman—doing what she wants, when she wants, without the validation of others—has worked out pretty well. There was a long list of film and television credits that followed Laugh-In—including 1969’s Cactus Flower, for which she won both the Oscar and the Golden Globe for best supporting actress, and a 1980 TV special with Liza Minnelli. (Find it on YouTube. You won’t be disappointed.) And when Hawn, now 71, came to the realization that “women have a shelf life” in Hollywood, she started producing her own female-centric films (think Private Benjamin and Protocol), which in turn led to roles in 1992’s Death Becomes Her, with Meryl Streep, and The First Wives Club, with Diane Keaton and Bette Midler, in 1996.

“Even though we were all stars, [Hollywood] was nervous about the movie,” Hawn says of the latter film, a blockbuster that grossed more than $180 million worldwide. “For First Wives, we all took a cut in our salary, we all took a cut in our back end. Because the studios were never sanguine on trusting that women carrying a movie would actually work.”

Ageism in show business is another battle Hawn believes women will never really stop fighting. “You think you’re going to fight the system? You think you’re going to prove to Hollywood when you hit 45 that you’re still a sexy, viable object? No. There’s a certain reality. Does it make me angry? No. I’m not an angry person. I’m not a militant person. Anger doesn’t get you anywhere. It’s not productive.”

And in the 15 years since she last appeared on the big screen, Hawn has indeed been productive. She launched the Hawn Foundation, which helps children around the globe deal with anxiety and stress. (“It’s a different world. You don’t have people coming up to you to ask if they can help get the lint off the back of your jacket,” she jokes.) She helped raise more kids than the general public probably realizes (“I’ve adopted a lot of children around the world, which I don’t talk about very much”); she moved from Los Angeles to Vancouver, British Columbia, so that her son Wyatt, who she had with longtime partner Kurt Russell, could play hockey. (“I wanted him to have his dream, and I wanted to be there as a mom.”) She also tried to bring projects to fruition wit her older children, actress Kate Hudson and actor Oliver Hudson, with whom she is incredibly close. (“Ultimately I am the mother. I want to see each of my kids succeed without putting myself in the middle of it.”) Then one day, Amy Schumer walked into her life. Schumer, who grew up watching VHS tapes of Laugh-In and Overboard with her parents, says of Hawn: “I accosted her on a plane. I waited until we landed, then approached her and said there was a movie I was working on and I wanted her to play my mom.”

“You think you’re going to fight the system? No."

“Amy laughed and said, ‘I know you don’t know who I am,’” remembers Hawn. “And I actually didn’t. But I could have eaten her face, she was so damn cute.” Though nothing came from that encounter, when they met again months later at an event in London, Hawn agreed to read the script for Snatched, a new Jonathan Levine–directed action comedy about a mother-daughter trip that goes awry. “I wanted to do this movie as much for Amy as for me because it’s how she saw her mother,” says Hawn.

Plus, she was ready to get back in front of the camera. “A break from anything we do sometimes is a good thing,” she says. “And I forgot how much fun it was. I forgot about the perks. Three months in the best hotel ever, looking out at the water. When I had to pack up and leave, I shed a tear. We held each other on our last shot and we cried. I came out of that going, ‘Yeah, I could do it again.’” As for what’s left on her bucket list? Maybe a TV series, maybe a one-woman Broadway show. “There’s so much to say about the decades I’ve lived through,” says Hawn. Regardless, it will be on her terms. “I’ve never gone the normal route, whatever that is. If it even exists.”

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